Shraga Elam

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

In addition to the convincing information that Henry
Kissinger “cooked” the Yom Kippur War in order
to advance his own goals, there is an op-ed from the war time written by James Reston, one of the leading
US journalists. The article that was partially translated into Hebrew in the Israeli
magazine “Ha’olam Hazeh”
corroborates the “cooking” theory and demonstrates that the US Secretary of State
was against Isreali and Egyptian victories. Kissinger’s broader goal is not
mentioned in Reston’s op-ed: that both sides will crawl and bid for help from
the US. Something that should strengthen the US position in the Middle East and
generally.

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Thestory in the NY Timesabout
the mutilated corpses of Munich Massacre victims is not new. In the year 2000
six such pictures were shown in the Oscar-winning documentary produced by the
Swiss Arthur Cohn. The two widows, Ankie Spitzer and Ilana Romano, protested
against this publication and called it bad taste and an abuse of their feelings
and those of their children. In a fax that Ankie showed me, Cohn claimed that
the widows had no rights to the pictures. Even so, in the Hebrew version of the
movie they were omitted and in the English version they were blurred-out (s.
e.g.,http://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/apr/11/world.news).
Cohn refused to talk with me, and then his secretary wrote an aggressive answer
to my polite letter.

On 4.5.2001 the intelligence
and strategic affairs expertYossi Melman published in the Israeli
daily Ha’aretz:

“In early 1990, after Ankie Spitzer was interviewed on German TV, a German
citizen who had seen the program and felt pangs of guilt at his government’s
lies, came to Israel with document samples – 80 pages in all. The documents
were examined and found to be authentic. The mole revealed that in the archives
of the state prosecutor’s office, there was a room full of papers relating to the
affair.
Spitzer appeared on television again and talked about the documents that had
come into her hands. The Bavarian minister of justice denied that such
documents existed, but Spitzer displayed the ones she had, forcing the German
authorities to admit to their existence and to allow representatives of the
families to examine and photocopy them. At the same time, the German security
services launched an investigation to discover the identity of the mole, but
they have never succeeded.

The documents in question - ballistic reports, pathology reports, police
testimony, photographs of the bodies and other material – have exposed
appalling errors of judgment, negligence, lies and subterfuge on the part of
the German authorities.”

Also interesting is what Ankie told Melman and myself, but this didn’t catch
much public attention:

“We know for sure that Israel received advance warning of a major terrorist
attack before the games, said Ankie Spitzer. That information was conveyed to
her by Aharon Yariv. He told me that five days before the attack there were
reports of something big about to happen at an international event in Europe.
It never occurred to the Shin Bet that it might be connected to the Olympics.
Spitzer and Romano received additional information from an unexpected source:
an Italian citizen who had been a major activist in the Red Brigades. Several
years ago, after repeated calls from an Israeli liaison man, the women agreed
to see him. The meeting took place in a Berlin hotel room, reminding them more
than anything else of a second-rate spy movie.
The [Italian] man was very frightened, they related. He was worried about being
killed by the Mossad and he made us swear never to reveal his name. He came
with a pile of documents and told us that two months before the Olympics an
argument had broken out within the Red Brigades.
The extremists wanted to join up with the Palestinians who were planning a big
operation at the Olympics. The moderate camp, to which he belonged, opposed the
idea. In the wake of this dispute, he went to Hamburg and met with a German
intelligence agent, who sent him to the office of the German security services
in Munich. He left his name and number, but no one ever called. They simply
ignored him.
But the man didn't give up. He went to the Israeli Embassy in Bonn and offered
officials there the information at his disposal: a plan, quite detailed, for
attacking the Israeli delegation at the Olympics. The security officer asked
him some questions, but obviously no one took him seriously.”

Ankie told me a slightly different version and refused to disclose the identity
of the Italian. I believe I have discovered his name, but it seems that he is
not alive anymore.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

In the ‘90s
Palestinian economists were dreaming of building a Singapore of the Middle East
in the Palestinian Territories. The excellent Movie Ilo Ilo proves again that
this dream was rather a nightmare, even if it would have been “successful”.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilo_Ilo

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

The US Secretary of State is primarily responsible for
the current crisis between the government of Israel and the leadership of the
Palestinian Authority. If not for the utterly superfluous American pressure,
matters would not have deteriorated to this point. Even a novice in issues
related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could have told the American
Secretary of State that the two sides were quite content with the status quo
and were constantly praying that nobody would make waves.